Quotes from Graham Greene

A big wardrobe stood open and two white suits hung there like the last teeth in an old mouth.

Why [...] do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, while on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It's easier to feel at home with a fat man.

If I seem to the reader a somewhat static character he should appreciate the long conditioning of my career before retirement.

Se vorbeÈ™te despre mil? cu mare uÈ™urin??, ca È™i despre iubire, când de fapt este o pasiune pustiitoare È™i ambigu? pe care atât de puÈ›ini sunt capabili s-o resimt?.

In one great case a man [Winston Churchill] who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of the country [1941]. One of Rowe's last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.

Loving God isn't any different from loving a man- or a child. It's wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.' He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. 'It's wanting to protect Him from yourself.

Mila ardea în inima lui mocnit ca putregaiul. Nu va sc?pa de ea nicicând. ?tia din experien?? cum se stinge pasiunea È™i cum dispare dragostea, dar mila r?mânea întotdeauna. Nimic nu micÈ™ora vreodat? mila. Împrejur?rile vieÈ›ii o alimentau.

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

Is the colonel seriously telling us,' Granger said, 'that he's had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?

quatre cent vingt et un

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

There was something defenceless, it seemed to Scobie, in his whole attitude: he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly- he didn't seem to expect some reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being.

He let us in.

How many hundred million Gods do people believe in? Why, even a Roman Catholic believes in quite a different God when he's scared or happy or hungry.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.

I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

Baines wasn't really happy; he was only watching happiness from close to instead of from far away

One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time.

I loved a man, she said. I told you—a man doesn't alter because you find out more about him. He's still the same man.

They don't want Communism.' 'They want enough rice,' I said. 'They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want.